Stratofanatic's Emporium

Entry #2 is up in the blog series .... see the original here . Or check out my posting below.

So, this really bucks me up .... I discovered a random blogger, Joe Hoffman, whom I discovered through a recent mention o n Brenton Dickieson's own excellent website  A Pilgrim in Narnia , and I saw that Hoffman was interested in Poul Anderson. "Cool!" I thought. "I'm working on Poul Anderson too." Then I noticed that among Hoffman's keyword categories was "Alliterative Verse." Growing excited at seeing someone else interested in this same thing, I clicked the link .... and, right off the bat, immediately saw a   highly laudatory reference (and link) t o my own paper published last year in Studies in the Fantastic , “Antiquarianism Underground: The Twentieth-century Alliterative Revival in American Genre Poetry”. The link used by Hoffman was to the version on Humanities Commons.  It seems like Hoffman was also familiar with Jere Fleck and the Markland Medieval Mercenary Militia, two groups important in the Modern Alliterative Revival. It...

So, I received an email out of the blue today from Dr. Donald "Mack" Hassler, a former editor of Extrapolation,  a prolific critic within SF Studies, and also my Honors thesis advisor at Kent State University back in .... let's say, 2005-2006 it must have been, so fifteen years ago. Anyway, he had just seen my recent article in Extrapolation about Poul Anderson's poetry, and dropped me a line.  Here's part of what he said: The new issue of Extrap just got to me in the mail, and I am delighted to see the new long piece by you.  Also, I see that you are now Director of Undergrad Studies in Arizona. I remember the old days in the Honors College so well and am very proud of how you are moving in the profession. He was a good advisor, too -- gave me free reign to do what I want, and very patient. If I remember right, after a summer of working on my thesis** alone, I then handed him a 100-page mess in September, un-proofread, with comments like "INSERT EVIDENCE HE...

Sometimes, you want to write academic articles brimming with social justice issues, critiques of capitalism, and trenchant analyses of our current culture situation. Other times, you just really want to write about evil possessed vampire demon swords. The idea for my latest publication in Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts , "A Brief History of EPVIDS," began as something of a joke idea. You see, not long before, while doing some work on Paul Edwin Zimmer, on the last day of 2018, I'd read  Blood of the Colyn Muir, the novel that Zimmer co-wrote with Jon DeCles. This novel is cheesy pulp sword-and-sorcery fiction, but I enjoyed it, and the the battle scenes are hardcore. Anyway, not long after, I'm walking to the gym, and this idea just sorta pops into my head: the all-powerful sword in Sword of the Colyn Muir sure had an uncanny resemblance to Michael Moorcock's Stormbringer from his Elric of Melniboné stories. (I really don't like the Elric tales, but any ...

So, wow.  Normally, I've never paid much attention to Nobel Prize winners, at least outside the usual Anglo-American canonical figures still taught in university curricula (so: Faulkner and Steinbeck yes, Kipling and Pearl S. Buck no), but I've recently had to read, as research, The Long Journey by Danish Nobel Laureate Johannes V. Jensen . Not sure what I was expecting, but a plotless Darwinian mythologization of the Nordic racial type told in absolutely beautiful prose wasn't exactly it. None of those elements are an exaggeration, either. The prose is absolutely breath-taking. It almost has to be, since  The Long Journey can only loosely be considered a novel. The "plot," so to speak, spans forty thousand years of human history from our primitive origins during the Ice Age, to the Germanic tribe of the Cimbrians and their robust but quasi-primitive beliefs, to the Gothic cathedrals of the Catholic Church, to the "triumphal" west-faring of Christopher ...

Thanks to an eagle-eyed peer reviewer, I just realized that Poul Anderson's epigraph to a short story "Chain of Logic," a translation of verse 45/46 of the Elder Edda's   Völuspá , is not actually his  translation. Rather, Anderson took it almost verbatim from A.G. Chater's English translation of The Long Journey by Nobel Prize-winning Danish author, Johannes V. Jensen. Except that the  Völuspá  verse isn't Jensen's own translation, either. Jensen had, in turn, borrowed the verse from H. G. Møller's original Danish translation in 1870. So this has led me on a merry-go-round of trying to compare various translations in languages I don't actually speak. Thank god for Google Translate, online ebooks, and amenable colleagues! First things first -- Jensen took the verse straight from Møller without changes, so that's simple.** Next question. We got two English-language versions of verse 45/46, one by Chater, another by Anderson. The latter, as I m...

We all know that he first published the novel in 1954 . . . but when did he write it? The question came up because my two latest entries for The Literary Encyclopedia , a biographical entry of Poul Anderson and an account of his best fantasy novel , just went online a few days ago. There, I mentioned that Anderson began and completed The Broken Sword in 1948. Well, no sooner did that happen than another scholar sent me a message asking for my source. And, wouldn't you know, I can't find it now. The issue's seriously bugging me.  It's pretty well established that The Broken Sword is Anderson's earliest written novel, which he wrote before  Vault of the Ages  (1952). Vault was composed in the 1951-1952 range; it uses an idea similar to one that appeared in "Tiger by the Tail" (1951). Likewise, Anderson mentions in his Foreword to the [January] 1971 revised edition of The Broken Sword that he wrote the original novel "twenty-odd years ago"...

So, I've been doing a lot of work recently on Poul Anderson as part of my R. D. Mullen Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from Science Fiction Studies . Basically, besides Tolkien, Poul Anderson is probably the most important SFF writer of the 20th-century alliterative revival. I know he grew up bilingual (English and Danish), and he did translations from Old Norse . . . but when and where, exactly, did he ever learn Old Norse? Did he take it in a college class, or did he learn it entirely on his own? So after doing some digging around, it finally occurred to me -- maybe I could just ask the University of Minnesota for his college transcripts. Turns out, I can  do that . . . so I did. And now I'm looking at Poul Anderson's transcripts. A number of things leap out at me. First, they misspell his name Paul Anderson. This is funny, not only because a transcript is an official document, but because the draft programmer for ICFA made the same spelling mistake when he p...

Once again, GoodReads comes through. Browsing through Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series, not because I really need to, but just to get a sense of what it is for an article I'm writing. Anyway, it's not that good as time travel fiction -- almost exactly the same, in fact, despite the nominally different genres (SF and fantasy, respectively), as Pratt and de Camp's Harold Shea short stories for Unknown . Well, reviewer John  has some nuggets that are particularly accurate: The Prose & the Characterization "[ A]a lot of the prose is pretty soporific , lurching haphazardly between a sort of relentless drab utilitarianism, an affected cod-epic poesy, and a clumsy impressionism. . . .Maybe part of the dullness is that, while Anderson gives us great slodges of political and military history, there's almost zero evocation of the various ages in which the stories are set. Since there's no real sensawunda either -- the time cops ride around on their sort...

Doh! I just received the program draft, and wouldn't you know, my presentation title is misspelled -- it says " Paul Anderson" rather than " Poul Anderson."** Alas, the deadline for submitting changes was about two weeks ago . . . but I never received an initial draft (and my e-mails asking for one went unanswered, alas), so didn't know to request a change. 'Sall right, though. Putting on a conference is hard work and highly stressful, and life's too short to nitpick minor kerfluffles. Plus the division head was exceptionally kind to accept my abstract despite its being two days late (and all my own fault), so this is probably just karma. ------ ** Btw, isn't "Paul Anderson" just the most awful name you ever heard? Amazing what difference a letter makes.

Well, just returned home after a 10-day research trip to the Eaton Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy at UC Riverside. All in all, results were something of a mixed bag. On one hand, I have a much better sense of the conversations that surrounded Poul Anderson's efforts in 20th-century alliterative versecraft -- formerly seen as only the province of Tolkien, Auden, Lewis, and a few other Brits.  On the other hand, I had hoped to find vast secret treasures troves of alliterative verse lying forgotten in various poetry mags and fanzines. Alas, not so much. I did uncover a few such works that I hadn't before known about . . . maybe, maybe , enough to squeeze a second article out of my research trip. Nothing I found, however, will likely shatter the heavens in terms of breath-taking original finds. Oh well. Even no information is some information, as they say (or at least I do). Still, the lack of success wasn't for lack of trying. Excluding dead time, overall I spen...

About to leave for Riverside, CA, so I can begin my 10-day research trip to the Eaton Collection of Science Fiction & Fantasy archives housed at UC Riverside. . . . trip is coming courtesy of the R. D. Mullen Postdoctoral Fellowship sponsored by Science Fiction Studies . (Click here for the description of my research project on the Fellowship website -- in short, it's about Poul Anderson and his role in the American alliterative revival.) I'll be on my own completely for 4 days. Then Martina is coming down -- not much to do in Riverside, from what I hear, but she has friends in the area, so we'll be having dinner and whatnot. But I'm excited to finally dive into these archives. Maybe I'll find a lot, maybe I'll find a little, but it's all bound to be fascinating. Alas, the archives themselves are only open 5 hours a day, 5 days a week, so I'll have to be much more ruthless with my time management that I might otherwise have wished. (I.e., no linge...

Although her husband, Poul Anderson, is by far the better known, I've recently been reading The Unicorn Trade (1984), a mix of poetry and prose co-written by the Andersons, and I've been pleasantly surprised by how good a poet Karen is. Initially, I went into the volume hoping to discover more alliterative poetry of the sort that Poul often translation from Old Norse sagas and such forth. Alas, Karen is hardly an experimental in form; lots of rhymed syllabic verse, sonnets, haiku, and the like. But she certainly creates some quite clever & striking images. For example, take the following sonnet, Conjunction (Venus and Jupiter, Februrary 1975) How pale is Venus in the lingering light When sun is set, but day is not yet done; While in the thronging lights of middle night Great Jupiter has splendor matched by none. But watch them now, as in the western sky Along the paths for them aforetime set He night by night strides lower, she more high, Until the stars of Pow...

Been working furiously since coming back from Europe, getting ready for my research trip to the Eaton Collection in UC Riverside in two weeks. So far, my main topics of study: Old Norse sagas Old Norse and Old English meters in alliterative poetry Evil possessed vampiric demon swords (EPVIDSs)™ in sword and sorcery. It's all related. In other related news, if there's any poets out there looking for inspiration -- the Norse mead of poetry seems like a winner. "The Norse account of how the gods came to secure the mead of poetry—a heady brew of blood, spittle, and honey—tells how the god Odin stole it from a giant . . . by drinking it, and then flying back to Asgard in the shape of an eagle.The giant pursues him, and though Odin manages to vomit [!] most of it into containers which the other gods provide, in his panic he defecates a little [!!!] before he reaches Asgard; this is the comparatively meagre and grossly degraded drink which human poets have for their i...

So, by dint of my work on Paul Edwin Zimmer's poetry, who once dubbed J.R.R. Tolkien and Poul Anderson as his "literary masters," I'm now delving into what Poul Anderson has done poetry-wise . . . . . . . and this has proven to be quite an interesting task. I'm pretty much getting all my information on Anderson's poetry from the wonderful  Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Database , and, while some of it has been reprinted in widely scattered -- and hard to find -- volumes of work, much of it first appeared, and continues to only appear, in the famous sff fanzine Amra . This was a great home for many 1960s sword and sorcery authors, including Lin Carter, L. Sprague DeCamp, and of course Anderson. So my weekend was spent basically interlibrary loaning hoards and hoards of Anderson poetry which appeared in the fanzine over the course of the decade. Many of the poetry, intriguingly, is not original to Anderson; it's almost entirely translations from O...

So, while I've been on this sword and sorcery kick, I came across Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword. It's often mentioned -- in passing -- in surveys of S&S, but I hadn't otherwise encountered it.  Reading it struck me with two things: Anderson's knows his Norse sagas and medieval literature . There's echoes of the Eddas, Kullervo, and Tristan and Iseult.  What's amazing to me about this is that Anderson wrote this book in 1954 -- and thus delved into this literature entirely independently of Tolkien's influence. This is good . The Broken Sword  is perhaps the first swords and sorcery novel where I kept wondering, "What's going to happen next?" I mean, I knew it would be something bad -- you can tell just from the source material that tragedy is around the corner. But I was captivated by exactly how everyone's hopes and dreams would come to a crashing, crushing end. It's also worth noting that The Broken Sword only tangent...